Mick Hartley

The BBC has something of a reputation for its coverage of Jews, as the Jewish Chronicle regularly points out. Indeed the JC has just launched an online petition demanding a parliamentary inquiry into the BBC’s coverage of Jews and Israel.

The move comes after a string of controversial stories by the BBC caused concern in the Jewish community — followed by BBC responses that only deepened that concern.

This week, the BBC admitted unfairly criticising Israel in a report on the beheading of a gay Palestinian by other Palestinians. And six weeks ago, an open letter to BBC Director-General Tim Davie demanding impartiality on Jewish issues was ignored.

And then there's BBC Arabic. From last February:

The BBC’s Arabic service stands accused of ignoring the corporation’s own impartiality guidelines as a JC investigation reveals large numbers of examples of apparent anti-Israel bias and inaccuracies.

Alleged infringements include systematically downplaying terror attacks on Israelis; repeatedly using Hamas-inspired language; showcasing extreme views without challenge; and publishing a map in which Israel was erased.

A detailed dossier of apparent breaches was handed to Broadcasting House this week. A BBC spokesperson responded: “BBC Arabic shares exactly the same principles of accuracy and impartiality as BBC News in English, and we strongly reject the suggestion that its impartiality is compromised.”

Today, the JC discloses that the BBC was forced to acknowledge 25 mistakes in its Arabic coverage of Israel in just over two years, issuing on average nearly one correction every month.

The most recent issue concerns the regular use of London-based anti-Israel commentator Abdel Bari Atwan, who also features regularly on MEMRI TV with his diatribes: here he is, for example, singing the praises of Jordanian soldier Ahmed Daqamseh, who shot and killed seven Israeli schoolgirls, aged 13 and 14, in cold blood. After pressure from the JC the programme featuring Atwan was eventually cancelled.

Not everyone was happy about this though, as Jonathan Sacerdoti now reports:

The BBC news programme that featured an Islamist pundit who praised terrorism has been cancelled, with its editor blaming “a particular group, government [or] lobby groups”.

Dateline London, presented by Shaun Ley and formerly Gavin Esler, was produced by TV Talk, which claimed up to 15 million viewers a week for 25 years. Episodes were aired on BBC News and BBC World nine times every weekend.

Controversial anti-Israel commentator Abdel Bari Atwan was a regular pundit. The JC has repeatedly exposed Mr Atwan for praising terrorists who murdered Israeli civilians as “martyrs” and describing a Palestinian gunman’s attack in Tel Aviv as a “miracle”. He also defended the 1972 Munich massacre of the Israeli Olympic team, expressed sympathy with the views of the man who stabbed Salman Rushdie, and said that if Iran attacked Israel, he would dance in Trafalgar Square.

In a further revelation, the JC this week discloses that Atwan claimed that the Palestinian “Nakba” was worse than the Holocaust.

In a speech at a farewell party, editor Nick Guthrie criticised the BBC for cancelling his programme. “Just because a particular group, government, lobby groups, whatever, object to views expressed by others does not mean the BBC has to kow-tow,” he reportedly said.

"Lobby groups". Whatever could he be referring to?

The Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) said: “Perhaps Mr Guthrie would care to enlighten us as to who it is who exercises such power over the BBC. British Jews could then direct our concerns, which the BBC seems routinely to dismiss, to them.” …

Last year the BBC was forced to apologise after Dateline London presenter Shaun Ley said that the Oslo Accords obliged Israel to give Covid vaccinations to the Palestinians.The BBC later conceded that the agreements “give the PA oversight of public health under the principles of self-determination.”

But it was Mr Atwan’s appearances that sparked most controversy. Over the last two decades, Mr Atwan has been one of its most frequent pundits.

Speaking on Dateline London after the Rushdie attack, he described The Satanic Verses as “blasphemy, completely, and it is offensive”.

He went on: “To talk about the wives of the Prophet is really very, very dangerous… About 90 per cent of the people of the Muslim world believe that freedom of expression [is] practised only to insult Muslims.”

BBC Director-General Tim Davie this week defended using the hardliner, saying his inflammatory statements “reflected the views of many in the Muslim world who view The Satanic Verses as blasphemous.”

He did not comment on why Mr Atwan’s remarks about the Rushdie attack went unchallenged, or why the Islamist was repeatedly given airtime despite his extremism on other platforms, as revealed by the JC.

In 2012, former Dateline presenter Gavin Esler hosted a launch for Mr Atwan’s book After bin Laden: al-Qa’ida, the Next Generation, praising the firebrand for “showing us in many ways how to see things from a different end of the telescope”.

Many BBC staff, it would seem, see things from exactly the same end of the telescope as Mr Atwan.